Create/Elevate - the theme of Harewood Biennial 2024 - celebrates the power of craft knowledge to bring people together.

The 2024 edition of the Harewood Biennial celebrates craft while elevating artisanal heritage to connect generations and continents.

Presenting significant, and large scale works from 16 international contemporary artists, designers and craft collectives throughout Harewood House and Gardens, Create/Elevate explores the potency of craft through three interwoven themes. 'New Narratives' highlights works that interrogate Harewood's collections and history. Local and global ecologies are foregrounded in 'The Use of Land'. And the convivial effects of sharing food and knowledge are explored in 'Nourish'.

Craft is rooted in the art and heritage of Harewood House and the selection of narrative-rich contemporary objects seek to open histories and inform and inspire new stories within the house and gardens. These works, embedded throughout the house and landscape, cleverly encourage new ways to engage with the environment of a historic house; actively, playfully and multi-sensorially.

Four new works have been commissioned for Harewood Biennial 2024: Create/Elevate.

Inspired by histories of communal dining and socialising, London-based design studio Arabeschi di Latte's new work Social Kitchen rethinks the function of food related objects in the Harewood collection. Working with Leeds-based ceramicist Jo Woffinden, her installation explores the traditions of sharing dishes by creating a series of objects designed to enhance the experience of conviviality.

Mani Kambo is a multidisciplinary artist based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne interested in objects, routines and rituals distilled both from the everyday and mythology. Her handcrafted wallpaper installation focuses on the human essence within each mark and pattern, responding to the untold stories of the craftspeople and designers behind Harewood’s historic decorative interiors.

British-born Ghanaian designer Kusheda Mensah’s furniture installation Onipa ye de acts as an alternative library within Harewood House. Her work creates a space for the transfer of new knowledge, enabling diverse communities to come together to allow us to imagine sweeter futures. The installation references a proverb from the Akan language that translates as ‘being human is sweet’ and means that no one lives in isolation.

London-based Venezuelan artist Lucia Pizzani is working with Harewood's head gardener Trevor Nicholson for a new sculptural commission Cultivo y Memoria (Crop and Memory). Installed in the Walled Vegetable Garden, it is made from ceramic sculptures, live plants, and fallen arboreal fragments from the Harewood landscape. The work explores ideas around spirituality in the vegetal world and ancient knowledge by using 'the three sisters’; a way of planting in the Americas where corn, beans and squash complement each other in a collaborative growth process.

Darren Pih, chief curator and artistic director for Harewood House Trust commented: “Create/Elevate builds upon Harewood’s reputation for bringing world class arts and crafts to all our audiences across Yorkshire and beyond. It presents works created through community engagement while taking a global perspective to reflect upon Harewood’s history and our extraordinary art collections and decorative interiors. Craft is a skilful expression that can be beautiful and illuminate our current times while providing models for living, learning and thriving together. We look forward to welcoming audiences to Harewood House to explore our 2024 biennial.”

Four additional highlights at Harewood Biennial 2024: Create/Elevate, include BEIT Collective works, elevating and preserving traditional handicrafts in Lebanon. At a time when craft knowledge and cultural heritage are at risk due to territorial conflict and climate breakdown, BEIT Collective collaborates with sculptors and designers to explore the possibilities of Lebanese artisans to craft useful and beautiful objects for everyday practicality. Working with Hamza Mekdad, their installation explores the multifunctional essence of a Corinthian-shaped heirloom from his childhood home and will be presented within the historic Dining Room at Harewood House.

Britto Arts Trust, a Dhaka-based artist collective, will present their large-scale collaborative work ‘Rasad’. The installation presents a full-scale small-town Bangladeshi street market, filled with individually handcrafted objects made from ceramic, metal, fabric, embroidery, natural spices and seeds. ‘Rasad’ explores the connections between the global food trade, the legacies of colonialism, and ongoing economic extraction and exploitation. First shown at Documenta 15 in 2022, its presentation at Harewood House will be its UK premiere.

Common Threads is a women's collaborative embroidery project initiated in Karachi in 2019 by textile artist Alice Kettle and one of two co-commissions with the British Textile Biennial. It presents a series of embroideries made collaboratively by artisans from the Ra’ana Liaquat Craftsmen’s Colony (RLCC), and developed by women from the South Asian diaspora in Burnley and Bristol and now with the Shantona Women’s Group in Leeds. The panels connect depictions of shared experiences of family and the meaning of home, wherever that may be.

Jakup Ferri, an artist from Pristina, Kosovo is adapting an installation of paintings, carpets and textiles co-created with textile artists from Albania, Kosovo, Burkina Faso and Suriname. He considers carpet-making and embroidery as techniques of ‘coherence and community building’. The Monumentality of Every Day was originally presented in the Kosovo Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale and will have its UK premiere, shown in Harewood’s Spanish Library.

Ligaya Salazer co-curator added: “Create/Elevate is really about the role of craft and some of the intangible ecological and societal knowledge attached to it as something that brings people together and is passed on through generations. All the artists, designers and craft makers that are involved are interested in this in some way. Inherently, we celebrate this in the Biennial - that craft can help connect with and learn from others and also because it can be accessible, sociable and tactile.”

Harewood Biennial 2024: Create Elevate will be accompanied by an accessible summer programme of educational workshops and courses, as well as the Make-it-Harewood festival of craft. Additional programming includes talks as part of London Craft Week (13-19 May) in collaboration with the Crafts Council and a seminar series in collaboration with Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Harewood Biennial 2024: Create/Elevate is at Harewood House from Friday 28 June - 20 October 2024. For more information visit harewood.org.